Max Bense as a Visionary: from Entropy to the Dialectics of Programmed Images

TL;DR

This paper explores Max Bense's pioneering role in integrating cybernetics, probability, and programming into art and literature, highlighting his influence on programmed images and the dialectics of algorithmic art.

Contribution

It analyzes Bense's innovative ideas on information aesthetics and his role in early computer-generated art, emphasizing his visionary impact on art and science.

Findings

Bense's work influenced the development of programmed artistic images.

The article highlights the dialectic between visible and computable images.

Bense's ideas fostered critical thinking on algorithmic art and science.

Abstract

In 1960 in Stuttgart, Max Bense published the book Programming the Beautiful [Programmierung des Sch{\"o}nen]. Bense looks in cybernetics for scientific concepts and instigates the thought of programming in the field of literature. His information aesthetics influences a whole generation of scientists and artists - including the Stuttgart Circle, which takes hold of the new aesthetics to carry out the first programmed artistic images. Is Max Bense a visionary? How is he revolutionizing the world of images? The article discusses the cybernetics that inspired Bense: a science of probability that contrasts with the principles of Newtonian physics. Moreover, in the sixties, Max Bense, together with Elisabeth Walther, launched the experimental magazine Rot, which devoted its pages to the concrete poetry and the first computer-generated images of Georg Nees. As Frieder Nake defends through his pioneering work and theory, these images oppose the visible and the computable. This dialectic opens to a critical thinking on the algorithmic image in art and science.